Author: Glenn

I’ve had the same personal email address for twenty years. It’s a great address that I grabbed when our service provider first started its own email service.

Last year, we were offered a special rate for home internet with a rival provider. We were in a 2 year contract, though, so we put it off, but come September 2024, we can change. And save money.

Problem is, I’d lose my email address.

I’ve been worrying about this for a couple of years, anticipating that we might get to this situation. Slowly I’ve been weaning most of my personal emails to go to one or other of my gmail accounts, but there are still a lot connected through the old one.

I figured out how to download onto my computer all emails from my old account. I had no idea what to do with these huge text files, though. Search for <…>? Import into Excel and use Text to Columns and then lookup tables to find unique results?

So I asked ChatGPT for help.

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I’ve found ChatGPT to be good for brainstorming and for research. It can help make up names for an ice cream shop or tell me what models of SUV’s were popular in 2000 or give me some ways that screams are presented in comic books. It’s more direct than Google for finding answers to questions and doesn’t bombard you with related sites that everyone else in the world is looking at. But you do have to be careful. If you like the name for a city on the west coast that it made up, make sure that the city does in fact not exist.

When I asked Open AI how to extract unique email addresses from messages. It gave me a few options.

It also told me exactly how to do this using Python:

import os
import email

# Path to the folder containing .eml files
folder_path = ‘/path/to/eml/folder’

# Set to store unique email addresses
unique_emails = set()

# Iterate through .eml files in the folder
for filename in os.listdir(folder_path):
if filename.endswith(‘.eml’):
file_path = os.path.join(folder_path, filename)
with open(file_path, ‘r’, encoding=’utf-8′) as file:
msg = email.message_from_file(file)
# Extract sender’s email address from the “From” field
sender_email = msg.get(‘From’)
if sender_email:
unique_emails.add(sender_email)

# Output unique email addresses
for email_address in unique_emails:
print(email_address)

 

I am not a programmer. However, I am self-taught in Basic, HTML, PHP, and some SQL. I’ve written a DOS program to generate number sequences with MOD 10 check digits for work, and I created the old version of my WordPress site from a blank, but I’ve never tried to work with Python.

A few stumbles later (the first installation of Python didn’t register in System variables properly, then I misread and thought I had to run the script from within Python rather than the cmd prompt, then I realized that I needed the script to output to a text file, then I realized that the emails were in subfolders below the folder where I was running the script) I had an 11K text file with all the unique addresses in my old email account. Easy then to import into Excel and strip the names from the actual addresses using Text to Columns. Then I could manually decide which were ones where I need to change my subscription address, and which ones are people that I need to email, and which ones I plan to dump.

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I know that GPT will state as truth things that are false, either because it doesn’t really know (I once asked for songs that start on the dominant and it gave me one that starts on the tonic. I insisted and it apologized and corrected) or, I believe that in certain circumstances where the user might be trying to do something unethical such as cheat on an essay, it intentionally misleads (searching for a conversation from “Sons and Lovers” that I could not locate, it gave me dialog that had the character’s personalities and sounded like DH Lawrence, but when I searched the Gutenberg text, it did not exist).

Some of the articles I’ve read about ChatGPT were written by programmers who were surprised how fast and accurately it solved their programming requests (A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft). This was the reason that I trusted the Python script that ChatGPT gave me for my very simple needs. Plus, I could read the script and see the basics of what it was doing.

So if you are in my list still using the email address from my ISP, look for a message from me asking you to update to my gmail account. If you don’t receive one, you’ve scrolled off my history of email exchanges.

My novella, “Water for TsaTsa” is now published and available, in the Rise Novella Anthology!

Available from Chapters/Indigo, The Pen Center, Walmart, Amazon.

Google preview available here:

I’ve always done some personal writing. Blog entries are one type—early ones that were collecting poker learnings and hand analysis, now fiction writing learnings and analysis—and all the way back to when I kept a personal journal as a college student.

Last year the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation published a personal essay I wrote. I’m told it was one of the most viewed articles in that column in a year.

In spite of my fiction writing skills, it was not an easy process .

The essay I wrote for myself was 3,000 words. I submitted 2,000 words to the CBC. My producer asked for a 650; the standard length for those articles. I revised and submitted but was told it had lost the charm and emotion of the original. I asked that the 2,000 word version be highlighted for the best parts and I took that and revised to 650 words, which is what they published.

I always write whatever seems interesting to me. In the past few years I’ve been writing more personal essays. Maybe I’m getting older and more reflective—I am at the age when many writers make attempts at memoir—or maybe I’m just shifting as a writer, the way that I started out writing novels and then moved more toward shorter forms.

But in spite of my writing and editing skills, personal essays respond differently.

I begin writing essays the same way I start a blog entry; with a thought that interests me. Then I write a paragraph, which leads me to some context, or a parallel situation, or an attempt to explain the source.

And then I meander, wandering back and forth across time, across situations, across related topics. As I’m writing I think that I’m being coherent and that I’m building a comprehensive collage of material but, in reality, it’s a bit of a hot mess.

When I write fiction I can edit as I go. Certainly not all of it, but it feels like a much larger portion than I am able to see when I am writing an essay. And when writing fiction, I can do this without knowing how the story is going to end. With essays I seem to need to reach the end and then define the topic narrowly before I can see some of the edits that need to happen. And even then I need outside help from early readers for me to find some of these things.

Another difference between writing fiction and writing personal essays is that, with essays, I often find that I have written too deeply or too widely. In other words, I’ve rambled on too long on one point or anecdote, or added related memoir or thoughts that don’t contribute significantly to the theme, whereas during the fiction writing and also during the early editing process I usually have a good sense of how deep or how wide to look. During the essay writing process I cast my net wide, feeling around me for anything that has potential to add to the message. I think this is not uncommon for writers of memoir; to write everything that comes to mind and then eliminate what is not necessary in the editing process. For me, as a writer of fiction, this is not typical. My fiction edits tend to be additions or alternatives rather than the removal of large chunks, and I rarely find myself needing to move one or two sentences because I’ve written them in the wrong order or have touched on the same aspect in two different areas, as happens when editing essays.

When I write blog entries I start with a target for the writing, not just a thought to ponder, so I know where I’m going more clearly than when I am writing essays. I tend not to meander quite as wide and I don’t require quite as much personal anecdote for confirmation. It could be the narrower focus right from the start that keeps it from meandering quite as much. On the other hand, maybe the blog entries are wandering and overwritten like my essay drafts and I don’t see it because I don’t have the early readers to tell me.  🙂

So, in spite of my years of writing experience, personal essays do not come out as close to finished as my fiction does. Like many other things, it seems that it is going to require its own practice.

I’m writing backwards.

I’ve tried something similar before, starting from an event, treating it as the effect and then looking for potential causes. And following that with the cause for that cause, and a cause for that cause, and so on.

This time, I have a novel in progress. I pantsed the first half, building on a basic premise and principle characters, throwing ideas and moments and subplots up without deciding on an order or which ones to keep. Once I arrived well past the mid point I spent a few weeks creating revision after revision of the order of the material that had survived to that point. In order to continue, I felt as if I needed to solidify what story I had so far like a foundation for a building.

Then I did some similar pantsing, testing, trying out material and ideas for the rest, but but at some point I got the idea to write an outline of what I’d written so far, in prose, like a Coles or Spark Notes version of a novel. Trying to get some clarity and focus, or just some ideas. And then I tried summarizing what might happen next. I’ve done similar before, with shorter stories. But this time, because it is a novel, it was interesting to read what I was proposing and to try on different possibilities. Because it was prose and not notes, I could feel how various ideas might work or not work. Because of how much time and writing I had spent spinning out material and investigating the main characters, it was easy to project into their futures as if I were watching a  movie to see how well they fit. And because it was an outline, it was easy to move around and revise and try to patch plot holes.

When I arrived at a complete version (and after revising that a few times) I started writing material that might be useful. Oddly, I felt most inclined to write something very near the end; just dialog between one of the characters and two officers from Internal Affairs.

Then I went to the previous paragraph in my outline, and wrote that.

And then another.

So now I’m writing the novel like a plotter. Only I’m writing backwards.

One of the challenges writing backwards is sometimes I have to clarify details. Even though I’ve outlined all the way through I don’t remember the details of what I’m supposed to write. Was the stun gun already mentioned? Do the police have a statement yet? When I write forward I don’t have this problem because the scenes I’ve already written are firm in my mind. They exist like memories, but writing backwards is more like I watched a movie and now I have to remember the order and write the story. The firmness of the sequence of details is not the same as writing forwards because it didn’t happen (wasn’t written) in real time.

I wonder if characters who live time in reverse have this same problem? Or, if they didn’t have an outline they’d be left like someone with dementia, in the future, with no memory of how they got there.

I’m listening to Mahler on Spotify. Randomly selected his 5th Symphony because it came up first.

I’m using it as background music while I’m working, but I started to wonder why I’ve never been a Mahler fan. I stop to pay more attention. It’s the middle of a movement and I probably should have started my attentiveness at the beginning, but I don’t hear classic melodies and development, not that I expected Beethoven, given Mahler’s late Romantic time frame. I hear motifs and fragments being varied and built on, like stream of consciousness writing or a particular style of jazz improvisation where the improvisor is focused on fragments and development. It’s coherent, with a string of logic, but I can’t make sense overall of it. As if someone is talking on and on in English but on a topic I have no experience with.

So I think it would help if I looked at some musical analysis that would point out key elements and how they are being used.

But instead of motifs, developmental techniques, structure, Google’s results seem as if no one understands music theory:

• “a musical representation of the Nietzsche’s concept of amor fati”?
• “contains every type of emotion”?
• “This is country music, by turns ebullient, nostalgic, and a mite parodistic”?

What is this supposed to tell me?

These are like program notes for an orchestra concert. Utterly useless for my purpose.

Or maybe that’s the point; that’s what Google thinks I want for when I search “mahler symphony 5 musical analysis”. It reinterprets my search using searches from everyone else in the world.

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Unfortunately, my searches are often not the same as the rest of the world. Nor do I find it useful when Google tries to “help” me.

I’m often searching for information relevant to characters in my stories. Characters in my stories often have extreme lives or are in extreme circumstances. It’s very nice that Google wants to provide help lines and counselling and self-help sites when I search “type of depression” or “extended grief characteristics” but it refuses to give me what I’m searching for, which is information or details, and not pages and pages of help. Sometimes, five pages down I find a site that is sort of useful and there I discover a word or term to force Google to be more useful, and in one of those sites I find another term to force Google closer and maybe I start to find what I’m looking for, fifteen minutes and a dozen dead ends into my search.

Duckduckgo is often better by not trying to be so ‘helpful’ and not reinterpreting my search for me, but it has the problem that enclosing words in quotation marks does not force the search results to always include that word. Quotation marks are taken as “suggestions” and make the word occur “more frequently” in the results.

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Fortunately for my Mahler experience I found a two hand reduction of the symphony so I was able to do my own analysis. The first movement makes more sense to me now, yet I’m still left in with the question ‘why’. It still feels like stream of consciousness wanderings in a way that I don’t feel when I listen to Wagner or Strauss, or to works from later composers like Debussy or Schoenberg.

It’s not all so challenging. The fifth movement opens with Copland-esque (yes, I know Copland is decades later) spaces and fragments and then fugatto and I’m good, I can understand ‘why’s in this movement.

Maybe this is like when I only had a superficial appreciation for Mozart until Salieri explained him to me. Or, maybe Mahler is the epitome of late Romanticism and in my depths I’m just not a romantic, the way that I have so much difficulty reading romance genre. Mahler and Danielle Steele?

My plan for my novel includes one primary inciting incident, followed by internal and external struggles, and ending with an opportunity for the protagonist to finish what was interrupted the first time.

But I don’t have a lot of material for the middle, partly because she’s been struggling with this for years prior to the inciting incident.

I am pantsing. I started with an interesting character and wrote some old incidents and some internal narrative where she tries to understand both herself and how she fits into the world. This allowed me to write myself into the story and to learn about her so I have a lot of backstory that shows why her unusual trait is difficult to live with. I don’t want to put all of that before the inciting incident. That would push the incident far back and might risk losing the reader, as if the opening of Star Wars had spent the first half an hour showing Luke’s childhood. The alternative is to put this all as flashback in the middle build but they are stand alone vignettes and internal narrative and lack action and forward propulsion. Too much of that will stall the story.

As I’ve been writing myself into the story I’ve discovered that her relationship with her father is another sub plot. I knew they were distant, I knew some of the reasons why, but as I wrote I felt there was more to it. Now I have a vague plan for this to be revealed and for the protagonist and probably her father as well to understand this and to grow through it and to come out the other side changed. In other words, this is a separate plot with its own arc.

What I enjoy most about writing is solving the puzzles. Once I realized that the relationship with her father is a subplot I also saw that I can decide the structure after I write the three plot lines: the main one, and her internal struggle before and after the inciting incident, and her relationship with her father. I can write them as three separate stories and figure out how to merge them and what order to present them to the reader after they’re done or nearly done.

Life, even a fictional character’s life, does not always nicely follow the three act or hero’s journey structure.

This feels good, meaning, quite possibly the right solution.

It is freeing to see this because it gives me some direction but it also allows me to write the plots separately. I don’t have to worry about the opening or when the backstory should appear or about generating more middle. I can continue pantsing, exploring more aspects of the characters and trying out more history and building a more complete psychological and family profile given what I already know and the circumstances that have already befallen them and what I anticipate happening soon. My hope is that parts of the two sub plots will fit naturally into the middle build filling it out so I don’t have to scramble around for more material.

The advantage of using Scrivener to write is that it will be easy for me to use three separate folders and then play around with different sequences when I try merging them. I’ll even try arranging everything sequentially and see how that feels once I get close to a complete first draft. And maybe a late inciting incident will work for this story since there is an earlier incident that plays in both of the other two plots. At this moment, though, I don’t see that the earlier one can be the primary incident since it doesn’t play a role in the main story except as context. It’s true that her development is the basis of the story but the inciting incident of the main plot is what pushes her to a crisis point, and I’d like to start near the end of the story.